RMN: Do you think you could define consciousness?
LAURA I would equate it with life, and life has many different levels of consciousness. In general when we say "consciousness," we mean that particular consciousness of which we are aware: the consciousness that becomes aware of itself. But there is a lot of consciousness that is, but is not aware of being, and of which we are not aware.
DJB: To some people there is just simply consciousness and unconsciousness.
LAURA Oh no, no.
DJB: Obviously there are many, many stages and levels.
LAURA Yes, oh yes. I believe that's why it is so interesting to be alive-because there is just so much that we don't know, because there lies forever still another surprise. How sad life would be for the person who knows everything!
RMN: Do you think that humanity is evolving towards, to use Nina Graboi's phrase, a "species-wide enlightenment"?
LAURA There are some good signs. The problem is that it is so slow. But if you compare what was going on in the Middle Ages--for instance, what was going on with child labor, and how people who were mentally upset were put into dungeons we see that there is an evolution. The point that my husband made again and again is that the real problem is overpopulation, which makes evolution much slower. Because there is such a large number of us, evolution is very slow. The more mass there is, the slower the evolution.
DJB: What was it that inspired you to write your beautiful book for children OneADayReason To Be Happy?
LAURA Because it seemed so natural. We think that children have such a good time; but often life is quite difficult for them. The same for teachers--besides parents, they are the most underrated, unappreciated, underpaid class in America. Teachers work hard to make school meaningful for children and children should acknowledge that. So I thought that children who do not yet read and write could have the equivalent of homework everyday, in the form of bringing to the teacher and class one reason to be happy they had that day; and then if a child says, "No, I have no reason to be happy; nothing is good for me, yesterday was terrible," then all the other children have an opportunity to surround him and say, "Look, we like you just the same and it's fine." There again such a little recipe, yet it could brighten the classroom and give the children the joy of being grateful; and to the teacher a measure of appreciation as well as a look into the student's life.
DJB: I was curious about how adopting a granddaughter at the age of sixty-three affected your life?
LAURA Oh! It affected my life! Tremendously! It is unbelievable. People sixty-three years apart are in different worlds, but it is very touching sometimes because she has this extraordinary kind of insight. Karen is seventeen now, and is just graduating from high school. She took me to all kinds of worlds that I had no idea existed. You see, I was brought up in a very conservative family in Turino, in Northern Italy--a totally different universe. Even if it were just one or two generations it would be different, but this is just so different.
I see that there is, of course, all the weight of this society which is not for a teenager to be heaped upon her. This continuous, continuous, continuous stimulation is really very difficult to deal with. I mean, I used to go to a movie, maybe once, or twice a month. Here we can push a button and have one hundred movies any time of the day or night, and many, if not most shows, identify sex with violence and vulgarity. Vulgarity is paid probably the highest amount of money. I am lucky that Karen focuses a great deal on her inner world and tries to figure out what's inside. She has remarkable insights.
DJB: Do you think that they focus too much on what's external, rather than what's internal?
LAURA To focus internally is made almost impossible for young people. The environmental impact is overwhelming. Every day the distractions are multiplied and are more hypnotic and addictive. Like with every addiction, the dosage must be augmented--so, more TV, more noise, more guns, more advertising. In the meantime, the body is not moving, is just accepting whatever it is fed, psychologically or physically. There is an advertisement for a computer Nintendo game that I cannot forget. It represents a young boy, about thirteen or fourteen years old, lounging in an executive armchair, grinning with delight; he is holding a terminal in his hand and he is experiencing (the copy says) the thrill of racing 200 M.P.H., of climbing to the sky in his B-14 jet fighter, or parachuting, or diving under the depth of the sea. All these thrills are given to him--free and for nothing. He did not have to train his body-mind, did not have to feel fear and surmount it; he did not have to face danger.
In Island, Aldous has a beautiful passage about the initiation from childhood to adolescence. Young people have been trained in rock-climbing as part of the school curriculum and today they are having a test. Rock-climbing requires skill, cooperation, coordination, and facing danger. "Danger," Aldous writes, "danger deliberately and yet lightly accepted-danger shared with a friend, a group of friends, each totally aware of his own straining muscles, his own skill, his own fear, and his own spirit transcending the fear. And each, of course, aware at the same time of all the others, concerned for them, doing the right things to make sure that they will be safe."
Do you see the chasm between a youth lounging in an armchair and being spoon-fed thrillers and one who experiences his achievement through his own doing--through his dedication and courage and his concern for others, through the training of his body-mind? Which one of these two youths will have the higher self-esteem and therefore better health and more capacity to love and to be a valuable member of society?
DJB: Is that part of the education described in Island ?
LAURA Yes. Instead of mainly verbal education as it is here, in Island, education is on all levels.
DJB: What kind of advice would you give to young people in our society?
LAURA I would tell them: Respect your body. Focus your mind. Love your heart. Support and cooperate with anyone who wants to do the same.
DJB: What are you doing these days?
LAURA- Now that Karen is seventeen we spend less time together. I am becoming again more active on Our Ultimate Investment, the organization I founded in 1978 for "The Nurturing of the Possible Human." The concept is that much of the predicament of the human situation begins not only in infancy, not only before birth--a fact which is now being finally accepted--but also in the physical, psychological, and spiritual preparation of the couple before conception. We call it "Prelude to Conception."
The most cruel and unanswerable question that, shamefully, is now a despicable political banner: "Should I abort or nor abort?" Must not exist in a culture that thinks of itself as advanced and civilized. There is more attention, time and care given to choosing an automobile than to the decision of creating the greatest miracle of all: a human being. Surely if the future parents prepare for this miracle, if they inquire into themselves and their relationship honestly enough, and then decide to have a child, the question of abortion could not exist. Dr. Piero Ferrucci and I have written a book, The Child of Your Dreams, which is being reissued by Inner Traditions International. In it we follow the future human being, the possible human, from the time s/he is only a thought and a desire in the mind of the parents until three years of age. It is an extraordinary voyage, the most extraordinary of all voyages if one pays attention to it.
DJB: Final words?
LAURA Final words are not my own. When Ferrucci and I were thinking and working on "Prelude to Conception," a prayer came to me. I did not write it-only wrote it down. It belongs to everyone. Here it is:
"Prayer of the Unconceived"
Men and women who are on Earth
You are our creators.
We, the unconceived, beseech you:
Let us have living bread.
The builder of our new body
Let us have pure water
The vitalizer of our blood.
Let us have clean air
So that every breath is a caress
Let us feel the petals of jasmine and roses
Which are as tender as our skin.
Men and women who are the Earth
You are our creators.
We, the unconceived, beseech you:
Do not give us a world of rage and fear
For our minds will be rage and fear.
Do not give us violence and pollution
For our bodies will be disease and abomination.
Let us be wherever we are
Rather than bringing us
Into a tormented self-destroying humanity.
Men and women who are the Earth You are our creators.
We, the unconceived, beseech you:
If you are ready to love and be loved, Invite us to this Earth
Of the Thousand Wonders
And we will be born
To love and be loved.
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Politics, Poetry and Inspiration
with Allen Ginsberg
Alien Ginsberg's poem "Howl, " published in 1956, caused such a controversy that it was the subject of an obscenity trial. Having received the court 's "approval, " it went on to become one of the most widely read and translated poems of the century. He is an extraordinarily prolific artist, having had over forty books published and eleven albums produced.
Alien's friendship and literary experimentation with Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs began in 1945, and a decade later as this core group expanded to include other poets and writers, it came to be known as the "Beat Generation. " He has received numerous honors, including the National Book Award for Poetry, a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, National Arts Club Medal, 1986 Struga Festival Golden Wreath, and the Manhattan Borough President David Dinkins Medal of Honor for Literary Excellence 1989.
A potent figure in the cultural revolution of the sixties, he has been arrested with Dr. Benjamin Spock for blocking the Whitehall Draft Board steps, has testified at the U.S. Senate hearings for the legalization of psychedelics and been teargassed for chanting "Om" at the Lincoln Park Yippie Life Festival at the 1968 Presidential convention in Chicago.
His Collected Poems 1947-1980, were published in 1984 with White Shroud and the 30th Anniversary Howl annotated issue in 1 986. Several books of his photographs and a recordlCD of his poetry-jazz album, The Lion for Real, appeared in 1989. He is a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters, and is a Distinguished Professor at Brooklyn College and a member of the Executive Board of PEN American Center. A practicing Buddhist, Alien cofounded Naropa Institute's Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics in Boulder, Colorado.
We talked with Allen at the house of his cousin, Oscar Janiger, in Santa Monica. He presents a very dignified and unassuming figure, his non-conforming and wildly creative persona loosely disguised in a professorial suit and tie. We asked Allen about his relationship with Burroughs and Kerouac, his thoughts on madness and creativity, and the nature of politics and revolution. This interview took place on April 23, 1992, six days before the Los Angeles uprising.
RMN
DJB: What was is that originally inspired you to start writing poetry?
Allen: It’s a family business. My father was a poet, his Collected Poems were posthumously published - they just came out recently, in fact, from the Northern Lights Press in Maine. My father was in the 1930-50 Untermeyer anthologies, a standard poet of that genre, lyric poetry, that included Eleanor Wiley and Lisette Woodsworth Reece.
DJB: Was it something that you always knew you were going to do?
Allen: No, but I always wrote poetry; since I was a kid I knew poetry. My father taught high school and college, so I knew a lot of Milton, Poe, Shelley and Blake when I was five, six, seven years old. And I memorized it, or it just sort of stuck in my head. I started writing when I was maybe fifteen, or younger, but I never thought of myself as a poet. I just thought that it was something you did on the side, like my father had done. But then, when I met Jack Kerouac at the age of seventeen, I realized that he was the first person I had met who saw being a writer as a sacramental vocation. Rather than being a sailor who wrote, he was a writer who also went out on ships. That changed my attitude towards writing, because now I saw it as a sacred vocation.
DJB: How did you mother’s struggle with mental illness affect your development?
Allen: I’ve written a great deal about that in the poem "Kaddish," in White Shroud. I developed a tremendous tolerance for chaos; other people’s illness, irrationality and contradictory behavior. I tend to throw it off like water off a duck’s back, but it also dulls me to hearing what people are saying when they’re complaining about their troubles. I sometimes just shut off and give them a bowl of chicken soup instead of listening carefully. I tend to be more concerned with people’s comfort and welfare - like a Jewish mother - rather than trying to solve a mental problem, a financial problem or whatever. So I sometimes miss the boat. Quite often there’s a tragedy happening and somebody’s sinking right in front of me, but I don’t see it. On the other hand I have a lot of tolerance for people who use drugs or are half mad. Sort of like how the children of alcoholics, in order to develop a kind of balance, clean up after everybody else and have a more neat and orderly life because they’ve seen the chaos and have reacted against it.
DJB: It seems that you would go one way or another. Whenever people are confronted at an early age with overwhelming circumstances, they either come out as a total mess or so strong that they can deal with most anything. Either you learn to become comfortable with chaos or you become overwhelmed by it.
Allen: I compensated by becoming more stable, probably because I realized that if everybody began disagreeing with me all at once, there was probably something wrong with my perception of the universe. So I took a more pragmatic view rather than an absolute view.
DJB: How has all the traveling you’ve done affected your perception of the world?
Allen: Well, again it’s the same thing; because I’ve seen so much chaos, I don’t really see everything. In a sense, I don’t see a lot of detail and have a tendency towards abstraction. That’s why I’m so concerned with it - it’s the medicine for my own neurosis. I use it to help create a sense of stability. I sort of turn off the chaotic aspect of travel too and just continue in whatever work I’m doing like keeping a journal or taking photographs. You might even say I’m sort of neurotically untouched by interaction.
DJB: By what’s happening around you?
Allen: Yeah. It’s maybe part of the same process with which I used to shield myself from the chaos, and it’s made me sort of aloof. I’m just guessing. I mean since we started talking about one thing, I just transferred it over to the other - from my mother to travel. I might have a different answer for a different context, but since we started out with a very definite idea, I just transferred it to the other, because it’s an aspect of the other, but it’s not the whole story. I mean, obviously I saw a lot of anthropological blah blah.
A lot of different views, a lot of different folk ways, different ways of wiping your behind after going to the bathroom, different ways of eating, talking, different kinds of poetics, different religions, meditation practices, different primitive rituals, different takes on the universe, different nationalisms, different chauvinisms. Experiencing a lot of different things makes your mind more wide-screened, or more tolerant. It makes you more sophisticated - or maybe less sophisticated. One of the basic things that’s changed is my habit of wiping my ass with toilet paper. Now I wash my behind afterwards. I got that from North Africa and India. Kerouac has a whole book about that.
DJB: I’m curious as to how important you think it is for writers and artists to have a sense of community. How did your experience with other writers like Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs affect the style of your own writing?
Allen: Oh, it affected it very much. Kerouac persuaded me to stop writing rhyme poems and revising everything fifty thousand times; to just lay it ou
t on the page in the sequence of thought-forms that arise in my mind during the time of composition. This is traditional with twentieth century painting and calligraphy style. Shakespeare never blotted a line according to Ben Johnson. With Kerouac and Burroughs, it wasn’t so much their instruction as the whole ambiance - their directive candor and informality. We were writing for our own amusement and the amusement of our friends, rather than for money or for publication. We assumed that nothing would be published from the very beginning . So the private world of my friends became the center of our artistic activities, rather than the public world of publishing, media, universities and literature.
Mavericks of the Mind: Conversations with Terence McKenna, Allen Ginsberg, Timothy Leary, John Lilly, Carolyn Mary Kleefeld, Laura Huxley, Robert Anton Wilson, and others… Page 38